With this pathbreaking book Professor Feagin inverts the standard Black History Month narrative. Its not just that African Americans have made valuable contributions to American culture and history. His point is that fundamental aspects of American life simply wouldnt exist were it not for African Americans. This is an exciting reconceptualization of the place of African Americans in American life.
Kirk Johnson, Sociology, University of Mississippi
Joe Feagin, the nations leading civil rights scholar, places African Americans at the heart of Americas greatness. Fair, judicious, and exhaustively researched, this book analyzes the many contributions African Americans have made to our country since its inception. Feagin answers those who would have us believe that blacks are a problem people, a national liability. Through the force of his inimitable scholarship, Feagin documents and discusses the exceptional assets African Americans have delivered to our countryin economics, law, science, culture, and spiritualityand to the global community as well. The great lesson of this book is that the black ethos is an emphatic representation of the American spirit, an ongoing demonstration of the hope and expectation that the poor and downtrodden can stand up against the system and succeed.
Roy L. Brooks, University of San Diego School of Law
In this very insightful and powerfully written book, Joe Feagin provides a necessary historical and political corrective. A tour-de-force through US history and its relationship to race and racism, Feagin thoroughly illustrates the positive and consequential contributions of Black Americans from art to entertainment to politics and social science. How Blacks Built America is an engaging and must-read text.
Marcus Anthony Hunter, Sociology, UCLA, and author of Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America
Part history lesson, part sociology of race, and all searing, unflinching analysis. Feagin documents the substantial contributions blacks have made to many segments of US society. This book should put to rest the stereotypes and misconceptions of blacks as lazy, peripheral takers and give students a new way to think about the American economy, culture, and political system.
Adia Harvey Wingfield, Sociology, Georgia State University
How Blacks Built America
How Blacks Built America examines the many positive and dramatic contributions made by African Americans to this country over its long history. Much public and scholarly discussion of African Americans accenting their distinctive societal position, especially discussion outside black communities, has emphasized either stereotypically negative features or the negative socioeconomic conditions that they have long faced because of systemic racism. In contrast, Feagin reveals that African Americans have long been an extraordinarily important asset for this country. Without their essential contributions, indeed, there probably would not have been a United States. This is an ideal addition to race and ethnicity courses.
Joe R. Feagin is Ella C. McFadden Professor in sociology at Texas A&M University. Feagin has done research on racism and sexism issues for decades. He has written 67 scholarly books and more than 200 scholarly articles in his research areas, and one of his books (Ghetto Revolts) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His numerous Routledge books include Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (2006); Two Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (2007, with L. H. Pica); White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics (2012); The White Racial Frame (second edition, 2013); and Racist America (third edition, 2014).
Feagin is the 2012 recipient of the Soka Gakkai International-USA Social Justice Award; the 2013 American Association for Affirmative Actions Arthur Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award; and the 2013 American Sociological Associations W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. He was the 19992000 president of the American Sociological Association.
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How Blacks Built America
Labor, Culture, Freedom, and Democracy
Joe R. Feagin
First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Joe R. Feagin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Feagin, Joe R.
How Blacks built America : labor, culture, freedom, and democracy / by Joe R. Feagin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. African AmericansHistory. 2. African AmericansCivil rightsHistory. 3. African AmericansIntellectual life. 4. United StatesRace relations. 5. RacismUnited States. I. Title.
E185.F36 2015
973.0496073-dc23 | 2015004282 |
ISBN: 978-0-415-70328-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-70329-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-79475-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Minion
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Contents
In recent years, we have heard many whites, especially conservatives, talk about the need to take back our country. This comment often references the growing population of color and its increasing political powerdramatically signaled in the election of Barack Obama as the first president of color. This conventional white-racist framing of the country, and thus of African Americans, calls to mind the eloquent reply to white supremacists given by the African American scholar and human rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois at the turn of the twentieth century in The Souls of Black Folk:
Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song; the gift of sweat and brawn to lay the foundations of this vast economic empire ; the third, a gift of the Spirit.
